Companies, including financial businesses, manufacturing companies, and service-related businesses, often store and maintain databases in distributed or stand-alone form that are supported by numerous database servers. The database servers may be virtually or physically different and may reside at the same or different physical locations. The number of database servers may be very large, spanning tens, hundreds, or even thousands of physical and/or virtual computing machines. Consequently, a company may assign different database servers to different database administrators so that the each database server can be accessed and maintained in a reasonable manner. However, even with the partitioning of Database Server responsibilities, a database administrator often must expend an inordinate amount of time to adequately monitor assigned database servers on a daily basis.
With traditional systems, a database administrator is often dependent on status indications such as alerts, notification e-mail, and/or messages generated by monitoring agents executing at database servers. Based on the status indications, the database administrator may then investigate a particular database server for relevant status information by manually logging into an identified database server and performing health checks, one server at a time. The interface provided by a database server is typically not easy to use. In addition, configuring alerting agents on a newly built server often requires a sequence of steps to be performed on the server. Needless to say, the above-described process is very time consuming and cumbersome and does not provide the status information in a timely manner, further reducing the productivity of the database administrator. Moreover, the number of generated status indications is often quite large and many indications may be irrelevant to the proper operation of a database server. Consequently a database administrator may spend a substantial amount of time on a database server that does not need further investigation.